Archives for category: Failure
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Texas Observer: How ETS Screwed Up the Tests in Texas

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2016 //
6

Patrick Michels of the Texas Observer cites all the ways that ETS messed up the STAAR tests in Texas. It is not a pretty picture. Texans almost missed Pearson after encountering the incompetence of ETS. Almost.

Questions with no right answers.

Test booklets sent to the wrong schools.

Students’ answers deleted.

No answers from ETS on testing day.

Boxes of completed tests lost in the mail.

Short answer essays with improbably low scores.

Long waits for test scores, some never delivered.

The upshot?

Somebody should be held accountable!

The Texas Association of School Administrators has asked [State Commissioner Mike] Morath not to use this year’s test scores to rate schools. In an open letter to Morath published in the Houston Chronicle, Ben Becker — part of the parents’ group that sued TEA claiming this year’s test is too long — said that Morath owes “the people of Texas a transparent accounting” of this year’s problems, otherwise, “you must throw out all the scores, order them expunged from student records, and assure they are not used for any decision-making. Anywhere. Period.”

Morath responded to Becker, telling him that while the spring test scores will be late, he believes they’ll still be accurate. Morath’s staff apparently drafted an apology letter to parents in April, according to the emails obtained by the Observer, but is waiting to send it once all of the spring test results are out — which now won’t happen until early July.

State Senator Kel Seliger, who has praised Morath for his leadership so far, has told the Amarillo Globe-News that Texas simply shouldn’t pay ETS for its work on this year’s STAAR. Whatever action Morath takes to hold ETS accountable after this year, lawmakers are certain to have their own ideas for reforming STAAR when they reconvene in January.

Don’t mess with Texas.

Categories Accountability, Failure, Testing, Texas

Peter Greene: When Charters Fight Charters, Grab Your Popcorn

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2016 //
10

The charter industry is split by an internal quarrel between the brick-and-mortar charters and the virtual charters.

Report after report has concluded that the virtual charters do not live up to their claims. The latest–from CREDO at Stanford–found that students in virtual charters lost a year of math instruction for every year in the virtual charter, and nearly half a year of reading. What do you call a school where no one learns anything? A failure.

Peter Greene writes here about the charter vs. charter dust-up.

Here is a news story about the battle between the traditional charters that have buildings and their Ponzi cousins.

Since elected officials are unwilling to clean up the mess in the charter industry, will self-regulation work? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Virtual Charter Schools

Michael R. Ford: 41% of Voucher Schools in Milwaukee Have Closed Since the Start of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2016 //
9

Michael R. Ford, a professor of public administration at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, reports that 41% of private schools that received vouchers have closed their doors since the inception of the voucher program. Milwaukee has the nation’s oldest voucher program, and anyone looking for the miracle of school choice should look elsewhere. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Milwaukee continues to be one of the nation’s lowest performing urban districts. Milwaukee has had charters and vouchers for 25 years–two generations of students. If charters and vouchers were the answer to the problems of students and schools in urban districts, Milwaukee should be a shining star of student success. It is not.

Ford writes:

Forty-one percent of all private schools that participated in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) between 1991 and 2015 failed. I do not mean failed as in they did not deliver academically, I mean failed as in they no longer exist. These 102 schools either closed after having their voucher revenue cut off by the Department of Public Instruction, or simply shut their doors. The failure rate for entrepreneurial start-up schools is even worse: 67.8 percent.

Fredrik Andersson and I discuss these data in a new article just published online in Policy Studies Journal entitled “Determinants of Organizational Failure in the Milwaukee School Voucher Program.” We frame the article in the context of public and educational entrepreneurship “with the goal of explaining the factors that put voucher schools specifically, and public entrepreneurial public polices in general, at greater failure risk.” The Milwaukee voucher case is particularly fertile ground for this line of inquiry due its long history, organizational churn, and relevance as the birthplace of the modern school voucher movement.

We test several hypotheses using a survival model and find:

Start-up voucher schools have a much higher failure rate. It takes almost ten years for a new voucher school to lower its failure risk to that of previously existing schools;

When new MPCP schools fail they tend to fail quickly, on average just 4.3 years into program participation;

Schools without a religious affiliation are more likely to fail;

Stricter program regulations led to more failure; and

Schools can reduce their failure risk by gaining market-share.

Read his research article for the full findings.

Categories Education Reform, Failure, Milwaukee, Vouchers

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley: Why Houston Kicked Out EVAAS, Its Teacher Evaluation Vendor

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
9

Last week, the Houston Independent School Board deadlocked in a 3-3 tie vote on whether to renew its contract with the vendor supplying the teacher evaluation program.

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley explains their decision here.

At least three board members realized that five years of this program had not moved the needle by an inch. If performance matters, then EVAAS was a failure.

Beardsley is one of the nation’s leading researchers in the study of teacher evaluation.

She writes:

Seven teachers in the Houston Independent School District (HISD), with the support of the Houston Federation of Teachers (HFT), are taking HISD to federal court over how their value-added scores, derived via the Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), are being used, and allegedly abused, while this district that has tied more high-stakes consequences to value-added output than any other district/state in the nation. The case, Houston Federation of Teachers, et al. v. Houston ISD, is ongoing.

But just announced is that the HISD school board, in a 3:3 split vote late last Thursday night, elected to no longer pay an annual $680K to SAS Institute Inc. to calculate the district’s EVAAS value-added estimates. As per an HFT press release (below), HISD “will not be renewing the district’s seriously flawed teacher evaluation system, [which is] good news for students, teachers and the community, [although] the school board and incoming superintendent must work with educators and others to choose a more effective system.”

Open the link, read the full article, and read her links. This is excellent news.

The bad part of her post is the news that the federal government is still giving out grants that require districts to continue using this flawed methodology, despite the fact that it hasn’t worked anywhere.

Apparently, HISD was holding onto the EVAAS, despite the research surrounding the EVAAS in general and in Houston, in that they have received (and are still set to receive) over $4 million in federal grant funds that has required them to have value-added estimates as a component of their evaluation and accountability system(s).

So Houston will have to find a new vendor of a failed methodology.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Houston, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)

ETS Loses All Test Scores for a Texas District

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2016 //
30

As the new vendor of testing for Texas, ETS is off to a rocky start. It lost all the grades 3-8 test scores for Eanes, Texas. Think of all the weeks wasted on test prep: for nothing!

 

“The state’s new testing vendor reportedly lost all tests taken by elementary and middle school students in central Texas district of Eanes, according to a report from The Texas Tribune.

 

“The site reports that Educational Testing Services told officials at that district that it lost tests taken by students in third through eighth grade, potentially impacting up to 4,000 students.

 

“This is yet another problem in an ever-growing list of concerns for New Jersey-based ETS in its first year of administering the STAAR test. Problems have ranged from the tests missing a correct answer to scoring problems to security concerns.

 

“The problems started getting reported in March with computer glitches that gave students the wrong version of tests, locked up or even erased answers. About 14,220 students across the state were impacted.

 

“In the Burkburnett school district, for example, some students had to rewrite their essays as many as three times after the system repeatedly kicked them back to earlier questions in the test English I end-of-course test.

 

“One student, after redoing her essay several times, finally typed ‘whatever’ in her essay out of frustration,” superintendent Tylor Chaplin wrote in a letter to the Texas Education Agency in April as he expressed his growing frustration.”

 

If a teacher or a school did this, they would be in deep trouble.

 

Mistakes were made!

 

Who will be held accountable?

Categories Education Reform, Failure, Standardized Testing, Texas

Readers React to L.A. Times’ Critique of Gates’ Meddling in Education

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2016 //
16

Here are letters to the editor printed in the Los Angeles Times in reaction to its editorial criticizing the Gates Foundation and other wealthy philanthropists for trying to control the nation’s education agenda.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-le-bill-gates-education-reform-20160603-snap-story.html#nt=blogroll

The theme of the letters is: why don’t people listen to teachers? If Gates had, he would have spent his $3 billion wisely and well. But instead, he squandered it on his own faulty ideas.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Laura Chapman on Bill Gates’ Big Fail in Tampa

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2016 //
13

Our friend and regular commenter Laura Chapman, retired educator, reflects on Bill Gayes’ failure in Hillsborough. Accepting his pledge of $100 million drew the district onto a teacher evaluation plan that nearly exhausted the district’s reserve fund, led to the firing of the district superintendent MaryEllen Elia, and was ultimately canceled by Gates and the district after no results.

She wrote a comment about the serial failures of the Gates Foundation:

“This discussion has taken me down memory lane to the public schools I attended. One of these, Hillsborough High School in Tampa Florida, has been rehabbed several times, but it remains a landmark in school architecture from an era when attending and completing “high” school was a major achievement. The website has a curated collection of documents showing the history of the school’s founding and various locations before the current building was built, with magnificent Gothic architecture, refelecting some high aspirations for the experience of going to school. The school has been rehabbed several times, with “moderate”but important attention to preservation. The International Baccalaureate program is thriving, but that seems to have created a school within a school and conflicts among the students and the faculty.

http://www.tampapix.com/HHS.htm

“Then there is the story of what Bill Gates did to the Hillsborough County Schools and the demoralization that his money has created–his demand for pay-for-performance, worship of metrics especially test scores, the wholesale destruction of morale, and now a budget that is busted. Bill Gates did serous damage to a decent school system. For him, there was not an ounce of value to this particular high school. It could have been a big box store.”

http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/hillsborough-schools-shouldering-millions-more-than-expected-in/2246528

Categories Failure, Florida, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

Ohio: State Investigates Online Charter Schools: Better Late than Never

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2016 //
9

The Ohio Department of Education under John Kasich has not been known for vigilance when it comes to the virtual charter school industry. However, increased media attention to Ohio’s pockmarked charter sector has caused the state to look into its underperforming and highly profitable virtual charters.

 

What they discovered was ugly. Inflated enrollments. Lack of evidence that students participate in instruction for the required 5 hours a day. An industry that profits while students fail.

 

The investigation focused on the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), owned by one of the state’s major contributors to Republican campaigns. William Lager has received nearly $1 billion in public funds since 2002. The money to pay for a failing online school was taken from Ohio’s public schools.

 

The New York Times wrote about ECOT a few days ago and pointed out that the online school has the largest proportion of students who fail to graduate of any high school in the nation. Only 20% finish on time.

 

Actually, it is worse than it appears. Stephen Dyer noted that ECOT accounts for 5% of the graduates in the state, but it accounts for more of the students who fail to graduate from high school than all the state’s districts combined!

 

This is a failing school! It should be closed.

 

The state may revise a regulation or two. Don’t expect anything dramatic, like shutting down the state’s lowest performing school, or basing pay on performance. That’s for public schools, not Ponzi schemes that contribute to Kasich and friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, High School Graduation, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools

Anthony Cody: Time for Some Humility at the Gates Foundation

By dianeravitch
May 25, 2016 //
28

Anthony Cody here reviews the annual report of the CEO of the Gates Foundation, Sue Desmond-Hellman, and finds it wanting, specifically its lack of humility and its absence of reflection.

 

Of course, Gates will “double down” on Common Core, no matter how many educators call for revisions.

 

But that’s not all. How about some reflection by Gates on the failure of test-based teacher accountability, whether based on “value added” or “student growth”?

 

How about explaining the debacle in Hillsborough County, Florida, which gave up on the Gates initiative after wasting more than $100 million?

 

Why no mention of the foundation’s push for charter schools, which replace public schools and divide communities?

 

Why no candid reflection on the disappointing results of the marketing of more and more technology for the classroom?

 

All in all, a report that shows a megafoundation incapable or unwilling to review its programs with honesty and integrity.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Industry, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

New York Times: Online Charter Schools Are Failures

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
16

Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times about the terrible results obtained by online charter schools. She focuses on the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, whose founder has become very wealthy thanks to taxpayer money and the friendship of reformers such as Governor JohnKasich and the GOP legislators in Ohio. Founder William Lager has been very generous to his friends who hold elected office.

 

A terrific business. A lousy education.

 

Five years ago, the New York Times ran a superb expose of online charters, pointing out that they are very profitable but basically scams that rip off taxpayers.

 

In 2011, the Washington Post published an excellent expose of Michael Milken’s K12 Inc, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

 

 

For-profit virtual charter corporations are a cynical business that exploits children and does not have educate them. It demands full state tuition to provide home schooling plus a “teacher” on a monitor.

 

I wrote about the online charter fraud in my 2013 book “Reign of Error.”

 

Numerous studies have concluded that these schools have startlingly high attrition rates, large “class” sizes, low wages, high teacher turnover, and their students very little.

 

The latest study, by CREDO, found that students lost 180 days of instruction in math for every year of 180 days in a virtual charter.

 

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy wrote about today’s article in the Times and pointed out that ECOT has received nearly $1 billion in public funding since 2002.

 

Frankly, these fake schools should be investigated by authorities, monitored, and limited to students who are unable to attend school. They should exist only as public institutions, not profit-making corporations.

Categories Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Virtual Charter Schools
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